I saw this lock at Walmart for $8 and couldn’t resist, since its so different than regular combination locks. 

Operation

Operating the lock is amazingly simple and elegant.  Rather than rotating the dial like a traditional lock you push it in the cardinal directions.  This has two big benefits.  Firstly it requires much less dexterity to use then a traditional combination since you only have the be able to push the lock in 4 directions rather than be able to rotate the lock to 39 different angles.  Secondly it allows you to enter even fairly long combinations in under 10 seconds.  The lock is also user settable to any combination you want, in less than 30 seconds.  (Assuming you don’t choose a 37 move combo or something)

How it works

The internals of the lock are truly clever.  I won’t bother going over them since there is this nice pdf that already does that.  And there is this great flash visualizer that shows you how the internals of the lock work in operation.

Security

Because of the way the lock works there are only 7,501 states the internal mechanism can be in.   So although there are lots, 4^8, combinations of length 8 all of them map to one of the 7,501 states.  More troubling however is that a combination of length 8 may produced a state that is the same as a combination of length 4.  The table below summarizes the probable ‘badness’ of combos of different lengths.  It shows that combos of length 7 seem to be the sweet spot.

*Bad combos mean a combination that can be open by another combination shorter than 5 moves.

Since all the combinations of length 4 or less can be tried in about 20 minutes, 249*5sec, having a combination that can be open with a combination of 4 or less opens you up to a brute force attack.  Unfortunately these bad combos are not simple to recognize as such.  For instance the combo up,up,right,up,down,down,left,right is the same as right,right,right,right. 

Conclusion

Although there is a small chance, that you can accidently pick a bad combination for the advertised purpose of protecting a high school locker it should be more than adequate security and the easy of use is much better than a traditional lock.

1. I wanted to run PNGOUT on my webhost server since then I wouldn’t have to transfer the files back and forth to compress them.  Since Dreamhost has linux servers so that required finding a linux port of PNGOUT.  As and added benefit this should make it reasonably simple to make a cron job to compress all PNG images later.
2. I wanted to basically make it a one line command to compress all my PNG files so I had to figure out how to find all PNG images under a directory and run PNGOUT on them

Nothing particularly complex so lets dive in.  Step one was easy as there is already a well know port of PNGOUT available although it took a bit of searching to find the download site.  Now I just download the Linux  Dynamic zip, unzip it and load up the i386 executable to my home directory on my webhost. (Make sure to make it executable)

After testing to make sure pngout worked on a single file I set about finding how to do it on all PNG files under a directory.  Give that I am not a linux expert it was pretty easy as the find command let me do everything I wanted.

find blog_directory -name *.png -exec ./pngout {} \;

That will find anything under blog_directory that matches the naming pattern *.png and run pngout on it.  That was easy enough I may actual setup a cron job sometime.

HKCU\Software\ORL\VNCviewer\MRU

Long answer

In UltraVNC it keeps a list of the host you connected to before in its little drop down.

Over time it tends get cluttered with one time use entries making it more difficult to pick the right one.  After it became enough of a burden I opened up Process Monitor to see what I could see.

After dialing in the filtering so I was only looking at vncviewer.exe I can see its writing to the registry in a directory called setting – that sounds promising.  Opening that up and routing around a bit reveals this.

Which looks suspiciously like the dropdown.  Basically you have some name/value pairs for the host names.   And index specifces their order.  And you can just delete any entries you want provided you also remove it from index.

And now I can sit back and enjoy my clutter free pull down.

<DataTemplate DataType="{x:Type game:GemCard}">
    <Border Style="{DynamicResource CardBorder}" Background="Green">
    <Border Style="{DynamicResource CardHighlight}">
        <Grid>
            <Label Content="{Binding Value}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" Margin="5" FontSize="18.667"/>
            <Label Content="{Binding Value}" HorizontalAlignment="Right" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" Margin="5" FontSize="18.667"/>
            <Path Stretch="Fill" Stroke="Black" Data="m0,0 l1,1 -1,1 -1,-1z" Fill="Red" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center" Width="40" Height="60"/>
            <Label Content="{Binding Gems}" FontSize="18.667" HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center"/>
        </Grid>
    </Border>
    </Border>
</DataTemplate>

And when I put a GemCard in a content control in my game it looks something like this

I like this approach a lot because I can just tell WPF how I want my classes to be presented and then I can just start putting them in listboxes with out having to worry about how the will look.

public static class ListPopper
{
    public static T Pop<T>(this IList<T> list)
    {
        T value = list.FirstOrDefault();

        list.Remove(value);

        return value;
    }
}

I eventually decided to switch to a Stack for the card game – but I think the extension method may come in handy for other projects.

open System.Drawing

let (|RGB|) (color : Color) = (color.R, color.G, color.B)

let printRGB (RGB(r, g, b)) =
    printfn "%d, %d, %d" r g b

printRGB Color.Red

I find this especially cool because I often have a wrapper function to do this sort of data transformation and this is far more elegant.

So I set it as the background and make the window style none and allow transparency and I get the following

Bamm!! I was pretty excite that it was so easy but then I went to resize the window and no joy .  So I ask Google how to handle this and find Kirupa Chinnathambi’s blog where he shows you how to do this.  The way his example works is by creating a bunch of transparent ‘handles’ around they boarder of your window and then handling some mouse events to do the resizing.  Here’s how my window looks with the handles colored in.

So I go through the steps and it resizing and am happy.  Since Kipupa’s was presented more as a proof of concept I pulled out the resizing logic into a base class and did a little refactoring.  The refactoring I liked the most was using Enum,Parse and a dictionary  to replace a switch statement. Turning this

private void Resize(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    Rectangle clickedRectangle = sender as Rectangle;
    ResizeDirection direction = ResizeDirection.Top;

    switch (clickedRectangle.Name)
    {
        case "top":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeNS;
            direction = ResizeDirection.Top;
            break;
        case "bottom":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeNS;
            direction = ResizeDirection.Bottom;
            break;
        case "left":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeWE;
            direction = ResizeDirection.Left;
            break;
        case "right":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeWE;
            direction = ResizeDirection.Right;
            break;
        case "topLeft":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeNWSE;
            direction = ResizeDirection.TopLeft;
            break;
        case "topRight":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeNESW;
            direction = ResizeDirection.TopRight;
            break;
        case "bottomLeft":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeNESW;
            direction = ResizeDirection.BottomLeft;
            break;
        case "bottomRight":
            this.Cursor = Cursors.SizeNWSE;
            direction = ResizeDirection.BottomRight;
            break;
        default:
            break;
    }

    if (e.LeftButton == MouseButtonState.Pressed)
        ResizeWindow(direction);
}

in to this

private Dictionary<ResizeDirection, Cursor> cursors = new Dictionary<ResizeDirection, Cursor>
{
    {ResizeDirection.Top, Cursors.SizeNS},
    {ResizeDirection.Bottom, Cursors.SizeNS},
    {ResizeDirection.Left, Cursors.SizeWE},
    {ResizeDirection.Right, Cursors.SizeWE},
    {ResizeDirection.TopLeft, Cursors.SizeNWSE},
    {ResizeDirection.BottomRight, Cursors.SizeNWSE},
    {ResizeDirection.TopRight, Cursors.SizeNESW},
    {ResizeDirection.BottomLeft, Cursors.SizeNESW}
};

private static ResizeDirection GetDirectionFromName(string name)
{
    //Hack - Assumes the drag handels are all named *DragHandle
    string enumName = name.Replace("DragHandle", "");
    return (ResizeDirection)Enum.Parse(typeof(ResizeDirection), enumName);
}

protected void ResizeIfPressed(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
{
    FrameworkElement element = sender as FrameworkElement;
    ResizeDirection direction = GetDirectionFromName(element.Name);

    this.Cursor = cursors[direction];

    if (e.LeftButton == MouseButtonState.Pressed)
        ResizeWindow(direction);
}

Which is a little smaller and more readable IMHO – although probably slower. Here is the source.

Flic Scanner Wedge Source Code

i.e. you want to have

include “/usr/share/lirc/remotes/one-for-all/lircd.conf.6131n”

NOT!

include /usr/share/lirc/remotes/one-for-all/lircd.conf.6131n

Hopefully this spares some one some grief.

Fastforward two years to the present time and its now time to get a new phone.  As the family geek I start looking into what would be the best new smartphone to get. So I start looking into the latest and greatest from Verizon and find that they have instituted a new policy requiring all smart phones introduced after November first 2009 to have either a $29.99 or $45.99 per month data plan!  This would almost double my mother’s phone bill with no visible benefit to her.  Although I respect the fact the Verizon has the right to do what every it wants with it pricing policy this really sucks for my mother and effectively means she’ll never be able to upgrade to a new smartphone again as long as she stays on Verizon.

So I call up Verizon customer support to try to get full details on the new policy.(Props to Verizon here the support guy was really good and understood the issue straight away and answered all my questions)  He confirmed that there are only three newer phones that can still uses the pay as you go plan, two new versions of the Q and a Samsung model.  And that my mother could buy one of those and add it no problems so she’ll be able to upgrade one last time this year.  Although Verizon doesn’t sell them any more as far as I could tell making here $100 NE2 bonus worthless to her.

Asking why Verizon was implementing this new policy he gave me the company line that the new phones were designed so they will download information for the internet for weather and such automatically and so the new policy was designed to protect the customer from overage charges.  Now I don’t really believe this is true but assuming it is why couldn’t they have just include an option to block all data access instead of requiring a data plan?  This is an option they have for all there phones so its not a technical limitation.

Here are the reasons I think Verizon is implementing this policy and alternative solutions I think they could implement that I think better respect the customers ability to choose.

1. Verizon doesn’t want to give people cheap smartphones if it isn’t going to make up the money with the data plan
   1. Only give the smartphone discount if you buy a data plan and stay on for a given length of time.  My mother would be willing to spend the $400-$500 for a smartphone if she had to.  Better that than spend $360 a year for a service she doesn’t need.
2. Verizon apparently had a lot of issues with people choosing the pay as you go plan and then being surprised with the huge charges they got.
   1. Verizon could give customers one month of a free data plan if they sign up with the pay as you go option  and in the bill show them what it would have cost with pay as you go.  If the customer doesn’t switch they are responsible for whatever charges happen no if and or butts.  Obviously this would cost some money on Verizon’s part for the ‘free’ month but they seem to run these sorts of ploys to try to rope you into other services such as their TV service so I don’t think it would be a huge issue for them.
   2. Verizon could require that you either have a data plan or you get data blocked.  Ergo no surprises with pay as you go charges.
3. Verizon apparently had a lot of issues with people returning smartphones after they bought them without data plans as they didn’t realize all the neat features required data access or what not.
   1. Verizon could charge a additional restocking fee for a smartphone if you either cancel the contract or ‘downgrade’ to a regular phone.  That should ameliorate any costs associated with returned smartphones.

Although my mom has always been happy with Verizon’s service and coverage this new policy has her strongly considering moving to another carrier.  And this is despite all in network benefits she gets since the rest of the family is also with Verizon.  I hope Verizon will retract this policy and replace it with something more customer friendly.